Networks today have become increasingly complex such that service mapping within such networks have become cumbersome. In an enterprise network, for example, additional applications may be added to the network. As additional applications are run on the network, additional information regarding these applications such as traffic measurements and mappings of the applications may become unwieldy. As a result, such information often becomes outdated as network system administrators become increasingly unable to keep up with mapping the traffic within the network. This problem is compounded by the rapid proliferation of new applications as well as the merger of companies and their corresponding disparate networks. As multiple networks merge into one the wealth of new applications continues to grow. This problem is further exacerbated by the ease and frequency with which a user may add new applications to the network traffic. This results in a “knowledge gap” in which network applications are harder to identify and track.
Each application running on a network may be associated with a type. One characteristic of an application in a network is the port numbers used for communication. For example, an application may communicate via a fixed server port number whereas other applications may communicate via random or dynamically assigned port numbers. The dynamically assigned port numbers may be determined at the time of use. Differentiation between the different types of applications and the different modes of communication associated with the different type of applications may enhance the usability and/or security of the communication. However, there is currently no effective means of differentiating types of communication such as between communication via a fixed server port number and communication via dynamically assigned or random port numbers.
Thus, there exists a need for a method and system for differentiating between communications that use fixed server port numbers and communications that use non-fixed server port numbers such as random port numbers or dynamically assigned port numbers.